This invention relates generally to the auditory presentation of documents, and, more particularly to communicating by sound the contents of documents coded in SGML.
The Standard General Markup Language (SGML) is a specification describing how to create Document Markup Languages that augment the basic content of a document with descriptions of what various portions of that content are and how they are to be used. The best-known application of SGML is the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), used on the World Wide Web ("the Web"). Other applications of SGML are XML, an arbitrarily extensible markup language, and DOCBOOK, used for technical documentation. The present invention is a new way of presenting documents whose markup languages conform to the SGML specification to people. For the purpose of brevity, documents written in any markup language conforming to the SGML specification, such as HTML, XML, or DOCBOOK, will be referred to herein as SGML documents or SGML pages. While much of the description herein focuses on SGML documents obtained using the Web, it is to be understood that the invention applies to any SGML document obtained from any source.
Documents coded using the SGML standard include both plain text and markup text, the latter of which is generally referred to as a "tag." Tags in an SGML document are not displayed to viewers of the document as text; tags represent meta-information about the document such as links to other SGML pages, links to files, references to images, or special portions of the SGML page such as body text or headline text. Special text is typically displayed in a different color, font, or style to highlight it for the viewer.
Because of the visual nature of the medium, the Web presents special problems for visually-impaired individuals. Further, not only are those individuals excluded from viewing content displayed by an SGML page, but traditional forms of representing visual data for consumption by visually-impaired individuals cannot conveniently accommodate the rich set of embedded functionality typically present in an SGML page.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provided a method and apparatus to make SGML pages accessible to visually-impaired individuals.
It is a further object of this invention to provide a method and apparatus which represents the contents of an SGML page with sound data rather than visual data.